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On a New Road

The news of Dennis Ritchie's passing hit hard. So muchhas been written in the past day. His impact was enormous, and outside the tech world, mostly unknown - but very much felt. C underpins everything. My whole career has grown out of C and Unix. Wow.

For most engineers working today, it's hard to understand the euphoria I felt in the 70s when a programming language finally came along that I (and everyone else) could use to move up from writing in assembler to a real programming language. We could do everything we needed to do to write all the low-level bits of systems. Before C, programming languages just weren't up to the task: the overheads were just too large. The sophistication of systems was really held back by the difficulty of writing large pieces of software in assembler. C was like JATO for code.

Truely James. For every Computer professional in the world, the first language they come across is C. With so much of wonderfulness and which also makes the learning experience so fun and entertaining. RIP Ritchie!!!

Same. I still remember when I got my first copy of K&amp;R from my high school teacher. I took it home and read a piece of it every night. Between that and studying the source code for the C library (yes, my high school had a source code license of UNIX back in 1981) I was off to a good start! That and looking at your Emacs source code (beware all ye who enter here ...).
It might not be mainstream but the world is full of programmers are are grateful for his huge contributions ...

But you did your huge part to spread his work. Where would I have been without K&amp;R C and SunOS when I was was getting going? My first company purchase was a Sun too, embodying all that goodness. (And where would I be without Java now?) So remember with a :) not a panic()!
Rgds
Damon

The way a smell triggers you back to remembering the entire sensory experience and mental state of some place and time in the distant past, remembering the time when I was learning C and Unix brings me back to the amazement of being able to do these incredible things that just weren't possible before, and wondering what existed beyond the boundaries of what little I already knew. It compelled me to keep learning. The network of friends and mentors who enabled me learn, and the long hikes I took through other people's code (like James's Emacs and NeWS, or Owen's PostScript code), wondering what wonders I might glimpse over the next hill, that I might appropriate, learn to imitate, and call my own.

I learned C (my sixth programming language) sometime in 1983 by writing code next to a couple of expert C hackers, who would let me hit every possible pitfall, and then explain what I'd done wrong.
It was quite a frustrating experience, but today C is my second-most comfortable language to use.
-jcr